


Some More Permanent Expression

by commoncomitatus



Series: Colour And Light [3]
Category: The New Legends of Monkey (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Daemon Touching, Fear, Gen, Trust
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-31
Updated: 2019-05-31
Packaged: 2020-04-05 06:54:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19043419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/commoncomitatus/pseuds/commoncomitatus
Summary: Final part of my Dæmon AU. Wherein Monkey seeks help in facing his fears, and Tripitaka gives more than he ever anticipated.





	Some More Permanent Expression

**Author's Note:**

> Last part, more or less. I might still play about in this universe now and then if inspiration strikes, but this is the last fic I had planned. I think it brings us through all the pivotal character beats we see in-series, anyhow.
> 
> Apologies, as ever, for spamming a tiny fandom tag with my ridiculous whims, AU and otherwise. We now return you to your regularly-scheduled canon.

**

He grapples with the idea for a week before he does anything about it.

A week of silence, of turning it over in his head and feeling weak and stupid, of shuddering and shivering and shoving it aside, then coming back to it, unbidden, a few minutes or hours later. A week of being distant and distracted, desperate not to think about it but unable to think of anything else, caught between two worlds and not wanting to live in either. A week of feeling isolated even when he’s not, of feeling alone and frustrated and hating himself because he should be stronger, should be smarter, should be _better_.

It was never a problem before. In the old world, his world, there was no reason to dwell on it at all. Every human had a dæmon, every dæmon had a human, and everyone — human and dæmon, both — knew instinctively which lines could not be crossed. Why would he waste his hours locked up in nightmares about humans touching him when no human in the world would ever dream of doing something such a thing?

But he is in a new world now, and things have changed. And now, all of a sudden, being touched by humans is a very real problem.

The humans of this new world have lost those old instincts, along with the dæmons that once guided them; they don’t know any better. How could they, when most of them don’t even know what a dæmon is, much less what it means to have one? Monkey learned this the hard way, manhandled and cornered and tied up by a trio of mercenaries, idiots who did not know the first thing about what it meant to be a dæmon, to have one, to _touch_ one. He still feels ill every time he thinks of it, waking up to the visceral, soul-deep discomfort, the sickening sensation of foreign fingerprints inside him.

A fighter from birth, his first instinct is to swear that it will never happen again, that he will never allow it to. But he knows that such a promise is impossible to keep, just as he knows that it wouldn’t erase the underlying problem anyway, even if he could. He could spend the rest of his life ducking and diving, weaving and hiding, making sure no human ever got close to him again, but what use would that be in banishing the nightmares?

He has to get better. He has to learn not to care, to shut off his instincts, his reflexes, the parts of him still clinging to the old ways, the old truths.

He has to learn to not be afraid.

The Master used to tell him that fear is the hardest thing in the world to overcome. At the time, being young and arrogant, Monkey only laughed, so sure that he would never know fear of any kind, that he would never have any reason to overcome it.

Five hundred years later, he remembers how the Master’s blood felt on his skin, sticky and wet, a nightmare made real, and he knows exactly what fear feels like.

*

Pigsy is the first to call him on it.

This is no surprise, though Monkey rather wishes it was. For all his self-indulgence, laziness, and general indifference to the world around him, Pigsy is startlingly perceptive when he wants to be; though he doesn’t often let it show, he is by far the smartest of Tripitaka’s dæmon companions — even Monkey, not that he’d ever admit it out loud — and he is always the first to know when something isn’t right.

Add to his perceptiveness the fact that Monkey has never been particularly subtle when it comes to broadcasting his feelings, and it’s no surprise at all when Pigsy corners him one night after the evening meal.

He wastes no time on preamble. As is his wont, he gets straight to the point, wrinkling his snout and demanding, “What is _up_ with you?”

Monkey, equally predictable in his own way, swishes his tail and mutters, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Sure you don’t.” He sits back, settling judiciously on his haunches, in that way he has of showing off how clever he is, and stares at Monkey for nearly a full minute. “He’s not stupid, you know. And even if he was, you’re about as subtle as a brick. So whatever your problem is with him, grow up and clear the air already. It’s making the rest of us uncomfortable.”

This time, Monkey doesn’t have to play dumb; the confusion that colours his face is genuine. “Wait, what?”

Pigsy narrows his eyes, clearly searching for deception, then relaxes when he finds none. “You and Tripitaka,” he says after a beat. “You’ve not gone near the poor boy in days.”

“Sure I have!”

But even has he says it, he knows that Pigsy’s right.

Well. Sort of right, anyway.

It’s not like he’s been avoiding the monk on purpose or. At least, not in the way Pigsy seems to think he has. He’s not annoyed with him or upset or anything of the sort; it’s just… well, Tripitaka is human. And, specifically, he is a human that Monkey is coming to think of as a friend. A human that he might actually — _maybe_ — want to touch.

Sort of.

Kind of.

 _Maybe_.

It’s complicated. It’s messy and complicated and stupid, and Monkey really, really hates all of those things. The humans of this world are sick, twisted creatures; soulless and merciless and empty, they would kill a dæmon — or worse, much worse — without sparing them a thought. But Tripitaka is not like that; if Monkey didn’t know better, he’d almost think he wasn’t really human at all. He is kind and patient and impossibly gentle… and, most important of all, such a rare thing in this empty, hollow world, he truly cares about his dæmons.

Monkey cares about him too. And he trusts him. It makes things murky, his fear of being touched by humans in general mixing with a new, quiet yearning to be touched by this one in particular.

Tripitaka does not share his qualms about contact, Monkey knows, and he wouldn’t think twice about touching him if Monkey were to ask. The humans of this world — and, it seems, a few of the dæmons too — have lost their old instincts, lost sight of how these things are meant to be; Monkey knows that Tripitaka shies away from touching him for his sake, not his own. He knows that it is respect, not revulsion, that stays his hand.

He knows this not least of all because Tripitaka has never shown any kind of hesitation in touching his other dæmon companion.

They’re sitting together, human and dæmon, on the other side of their little campsite. Tripitaka is tending the fire, staring into its heart with a distant, thoughtful look, and Sandy is lying next to him; she’s lazing about in her otter form, sprawled on her back, and Tripitaka absently reaches down every now and then to pet her belly or her head like a cat or a puppy, like he’s entirely forgotten she’s a dæmon and sees only the animal form she’s taken.

Not so long ago, Monkey would have been horrified by the sight of such casual intimacy between a human and a dæmon who wasn’t his own. Now it’s just another part of their odd friendship.

Watching him as he watches them, Pigsy shakes his head and says, “They make it look so easy, don’t they?”

Monkey jolts back to the conversation with an unpleasant start. “Huh?”

“The contact thing.” The elucidation is unwelcome, and so his his grin. “They make it look almost normal.”

Monkey winces. Apparently he’s even less subtle than he thought.

He doesn’t bother to deny it, of course; even if he did, he knows that Pigsy would see through the deception in an instant. If he’s quick enough to cut to the heart of it already, he’ll certainly be quick enough to recognise any feint at deception. Monkey has plenty of amazing talents, but hiding the truth has never been one of them.

“It’s _not_ normal, though,” he says with a huff. “It’s wrong. You know that as well as I do It’s always been wrong, touching other people’s dæmons, and it always will be.”

“She doesn’t seem to feel that way,” Pigsy points out, maddeningly reasonable. “And neither does he. I mean, sure, they’re too young to remember the way things were…”

“The way things _should be_ ,” Monkey corrects irritably.

“Sure, sure.” He shifts where he sits, joints creaking. “Except, you know, nothing’s really the way it should be any more. It’s all changed, everything. Maybe the only way to survive is for us to change with it.”

 _Right_ , Monkey thinks bitterly. Easy for him to say something like that; he lived through all those stupid changes. He watched the world transform, lived and breathed it as it happened. He felt the shift in the earth as the humans lost their souls, watched as the light and colour faded, bit by bit, until there was nothing left. Tripitaka and Sandy might have been born to this nightmare of a world, but Pigsy wasn’t; he has lived in both, the old world and the new, and he has made them both his home. In a way, he’s the most well-adjusted of them all.

“Have you?” Monkey asks him. “Changed with the times, I mean.” There’s a hitch in his voice as he says it, subtle but undeniable, and he has no doubt that Pigsy can hear his feelings in the space between his words. “Easy to preach change, big guy, but to put it into practice…” He waves a hand, leaves the rest unspoken. “You’ve lived long enough in this hellscape: how many humans have touched _you_?”

Pigsy ponders that for a moment. The hesitation alone is more than Monkey would have expected; he was assuming a straight, flat zero.

As far as he’s seen, Pigsy is no less discomfited than he is by the idea of dæmon-human contact. Sure, he acts careless when he watches Tripitaka with Sandy, but he shows his hand in the rare moments when the monk forgets himself and moves to touch him as well. He may not recoil physically the way Monkey does, but the same feeling is definitely in him. A little better hidden, but there.

So then, it’s doubly surprising when he leans back, shrugs his great broad shoulders and says, “It’s been known to happen.”

“Seriously?” Monkey doesn’t even try to mask his disbelief. “I mean, did you let them? Or was it…”

He doesn’t finish. Doesn’t need to. Pigsy’s features are wholly unreadable, but there is a shift in his body that says he hears it loud and clear.

Still, his expression doesn’t give away anything of his feelings. A benefit of his porcine form, and the absence of a human to express the hidden parts of him; a dæmon without a human is like a face with only half an expression, as hard to read as humans without dæmons; neither one of them are whole, and sometimes it’s like trying to interpret a new language, trying to make sense of one without the other.

Sandy is simple. She’s so damaged, so completely lacking in any kind of awareness of the world around her, she doesn’t know how to control her emotions. And even if she could, so far as Monkey can tell, she only has two in the first place: agitated and sleepy. It doesn’t exactly take a genius to figure out which one of them she’s feeling in a given moment.

Tripitaka is a little harder, not least of all because he’s a monk. Even in the old world, his kind were known for being elusive, and they tended to lack dæmons even back then. Monkey has encountered a decent number in his time, though none quite like Tripitaka. Some days, it seems like he can shroud himself completely, like he can drive his feelings away with a thought, will them out of existence simply because they’re inconvenient. But then, other times, it’s like he lays his heart entirely bare, becoming so transparent and open that Monkey almost wonders if he does have a dæmon of his own after all.

Pigsy is by far the most closed-off and difficult to read. A natural habit for pig dæmons, Monkey knows, but still he has a frustrating tendency to take it to extremes. He’ll stare at them for minutes at a time, ponderous and contemplative, then grumble something about being hungry and lumber away like nothing happened at all. Sometimes Monkey thinks he does it just to annoy them; other times, he’d swear the secretive pig dæmon is keeping a record of all their behaviour, like he wants to build up an arsenal of weaknesses to use against them.

He’s looking at Monkey that way now, like he’s holding his cards close to his chest, like he wants Monkey to break down and beg him to share his experiences. Like that’s ever worked before. Like Monkey would ever beg anyone for anything, least of all _him_ for _this_.

Finally, with a quiet sort of surrender, Pigsy says, “I lived as a farm animal, remember?”

Monkey quirks a brow. “Sure. So?”

It’s genuine ignorance, not cruelty, that makes him ask, and Pigsy seems to understand that. He turns away slightly, like he’s upset or ashamed, but doesn’t get visibly angry. He very rarely does; Monkey envies that.

“You do what you need to do,” Pigsy explains after a tense beat. “A little contact doesn’t seem quite so awful when the alternative is death.”

Monkey thinks back with a shudder, recalling his own experience with unwanted contact. Coming around in that dank cave, drugged and confused, tied to a rock with an acute, intangible sense of violation, of feeling like his insides had been pulled apart and rearranged without his permission. The humans in this world would do that sort of thing without hesitation, he knows, and if he can’t find the courage to do the same in return — to attack them, even with his bare hands, before they can get theirs on him — he has a nasty feeling that death won’t be too far away.

“Does it get better?” he hears himself ask, stomach clenching with disgust and dread. He glances at Tripitaka and Sandy, studies the simple, effortless contact between them. “She makes it look like it doesn’t hurt at all, being touched like that, by him. But it does. I know it does, I’ve felt it.”

Pigsy sighs. He’s not looking at the others any more; he’s frowning down into the dirt, ponderous and private, like he’s trying to divine meaning from the patterns in the earth.

“You get used to it,” he murmurs at last. “When you know there’s no other choice, that it’s contact or death, you tell yourself…” His eyes slide shut for just a fraction of a second, as though overcome by some bone-deep weariness. “The world has changed. The people too. They don’t… their intentions are different now. When they touch us, they don’t think about what it means, how it might feel. It’s just… that’s what they’re like. They touch everything. They…”

He trails off, shaking his head. There is a deep sadness in him now, a wash of feeling so profound even Monkey can see it. He very rarely lets so much of his heart to the surface, and the sight of it is staggering.

“They _taint_ everything,” Monkey says, with quiet vehemence. “They make us dirty, cover us with their fingerprints. They make us like _them_ , twisted and wrong.”

“Don’t know that I’d go that far,” Pigsy muses, a little softer to counter Monkey’s passion. “But it’s the way things are now. Humans touch everything. Even us.”

Monkey glances back at Tripitaka again. Skin glowing in the firelight as he bows his head to say something to Sandy, he looks almost ethereal, like something from beyond the world.

Whatever it is he’s saying, Sandy does not speak. It is still a work-in-progress for her, speech, and even now she can’t always manage it, but her body responds here where her voice cannot, lifting and leaning into Tripitaka’s gentle, soothing touches. If Monkey didn’t know any better, he’d think she was a domestic pet, not a dæmon severed from her human at birth, a troubled and traumatised creature who, until very recently, couldn’t even form words; the calm is a good look on her, but it doesn’t take away the strangeness of the scene, the contact and the connection with a human who is not her own.

Monkey had a bond like that once, with the Master, but it felt so different to what he sees in front of him now. They weren’t connected, but they shared their lives, body and soul, as if they were; not like Tripitaka, treating Sandy like a favoured pet, or Sandy seeking comfort in the only human who hasn’t rejected or abandoned her, but with all the heart and intimacy of the truly connected. The Master might not have been Monkey’s human in truth, but still in all the ways that mattered, their connection was true and pure.

So Monkey thought, anyway. He remembers the Master’s voice in his head, his teachings, his quiet morning prayers. He remembers his touches, too, a reassuring hand on his shoulder or his head, the way he would correct Monkey’s posture when teaching him combat or meditation, fingers gripping his elbow, supportive and unexpectedly strong. Encouragement, guidance, education, a thousand gestures in any moment of contact. For a time — too short, too sweet — they were Monkey’s whole world.

But then the Master died, and Monkey looked down at his lifeless body and touched him, and he found that the warmth that had always made him feel alive and connected was suddenly gone, the world turned cold and empty, and he drew back his hands and found them dark with blood.

He cannot imagine touching another human again by choice, contact born of love and warmth and trust. Can’t imagine going through that awful moment for a second time, grief and loss, survival when every instinct in his body was waiting to die with his human, the horrified realisation that the connection was never really there at all.

Tripitaka is as pure a human as Monkey has ever known — maybe even as pure as the Master, though they couldn’t be more different — but the part of Monkey that yearns for him is the very same part that wakes soaked in sweat in the middle of the night, remembering the Master’s death and the terrible wrongness he felt in touching his corpse.

It takes a great force of effort to tear his gaze away from the monk, to look back to Pigsy and bring himself back to the present, to the conversation at hand. It takes so much out of him that there is nothing left to try and hide his sudden vulnerability.

“What about him?” His voice sounds strangely high, even to his own ears, a hoarse sort of rasp. “You ever let the monk touch you?”

Pigsy considers this, measured and calculated. It’s a pretty simple question, so far as Monkey can tell, but still he thinks about it like it’s a matter of life and death.

“No,” he says, after a long moment, in that lazy monotone that says he’s either half-asleep or buried in some deep thought. “I haven’t. But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t.”

Monkey understands the distinction, perhaps better than anyone. “You trust him that much?”

“Sure.” For the briefest of seconds, he looks almost heartbroken. It’s so rare that he allows any kind of feeling to show on his face, Monkey is momentarily thrown by the weight of it. “He’s one of the good ones, you know? Not so many of those still around these days. And living in a world like this…”

He shakes his head. Monkey understands that too. “It’s hard,” he agrees, thinking of his own loneliness.

“And harder still without contact,” Pigsy says softly. “Especially when you remember how it felt to have it. How it felt to… to still be connected.”

He turns away, and Monkey grimaces. Once, he might have believed he understood that feeling as well, but things have changed and now he just feels ashamed. As deep as his relationship with the Master went, as true as it felt at the time, it was never a real connection, and he can no longer think about it without thinking of all the pain that came after: the Master’s death, his cold body, his hot blood on Monkey’s hands, the way it brought the truth crashing down around him.

“I wouldn’t know,” he says. It is both true and not true, and it makes his throat hurt to say. “Whatever you might have heard, we were never connected. The Master and I, that is. Our friendship was…”

“Simpler?”

Spoken without judgement or accusation. That’s still a pretty new development for the two of them; Pigsy still looks at him with mistrust sometimes, not quite able to leave his old prejudices behind, the lies that were spread for so long as truth. Still, for all that he believed them, he is making the effort to change, and that shows through now. Monkey knows it must be difficult for him, seeing the dæmon he once believed was the cause of all his pain — and there is so much of it, even now — and trying to accept that he had it all wrong.

It is rare for him to speak openly about these things, to look at Monkey and address him as an equal, an ally, perhaps even a friend, with none of the bitterness and hurt that coated his tongue when they first met. Rare for him to look at Monkey with compassion, even, as though catching the differences between them and seeing that their paths, though very different, are equally dark.

“Simpler,” Monkey agrees, accepting his softness and returning it in kind. “We touched sometimes, but it wasn’t… I didn’t realise it wasn’t the same, you know, until after he died. Until I touched his body and felt…” The memory lashes him; he trembles and doesn’t even try to hide it. “It was like it all came rushing over me in a flood, you know? The truth of it. That we weren’t real, that we should never have touched, that it was wrong… that _we_ were…”

He trails off, tripping and stumbling over the words like the clumsy oaf he is. Pigsy is watching him, still contemplative, still without judgement, eyes sort of half-lidded, like he’s staving off the urge to fall asleep.

“I’ve lived a long time,” Pigsy says, after a quiet beat. “I remember the days when every human had a dæmon, when every dæmon was loved and cherished and valued. And I’ve watched it all change. I’ve watched our kind get slowly wiped out, rejected and neglected by their humans until there’s nothing left of us or them. I’ve watched it all die, the sacred bond between us, the beauty in contact, all of it. Everything we’ve lost… I watched it all happen.”

He lets his eyes slide completely shut then, like he needs a moment to himself. Monkey turns away, granting him as much privacy as he can, a little breathless, a little awed, and — in spite of himself — a little more respectful.

“I woke up to this,” he says. “Everything that was right is suddenly wrong, everything that was sacred is suddenly a sin. It’s all a mess, all twisted up and confusing, and I don’t know how to feel about anything.”

Pigsy is smiling slightly when he opens his eyes again; somehow, the expression makes him look more sad, not less.

“It’s easy to know what’s wrong when everything is right,” he points out. “Not so much when it’s the other way around, when everything’s wrong and you’ve got to figure out what’s right for yourself.” Still smiling, still sad, still without any measure of judgement. Still, Monkey finds he can’t look him in the eye. “Take comfort where you find it, whatever form it takes. Some of us had to learn that one the hard way.”

Desperate to keep his eyes off that strained smile, the ancient sadness, Monkey looks again at Tripitaka and Sandy, at the easy contact between them, the illusion that what they do is natural and normal and good. It is so much like the bond Monkey shared with the Master, and yet completely different at the same time. Even now, having made his peace with the sight of them together, knowing what he does about how Sandy came to be the way she is, he still doesn’t know how to really feel about it.

“They don’t know any better,” he muses aloud. “Do you think that’s why it doesn’t hurt when he touches her?”

Pigsy quirks a brow. “Pretty big assumption, there,” he observes. “The way she is, maybe it does hurt. Maybe she’s just so used to everything hurting all the time anyway, it feels less awful when it comes from someone who doesn’t mean it to.”

Monkey never thought about it like that. A kind of pain that can bring comfort, a kind of pain that washes away the other kinds, deeper and darker. It should horrify him, he’s sure; before he came out of the rock he could barely imagine an existence that hurt so much, that hurt all the time, but since Tripitaka broke him out, he’s starting to understand the feeling all too well.

Everything is jagged and sharp in this stupid new world, so lifeless and colourless and empty; it’s a constant pressure on his senses, a constant struggle to keep his eyes open and his mind engaged. Maybe it’s the same for Sandy, severed and torn apart from her human at such a young age; maybe it hurts her too, simply existing in this mess of a world, so much so that even the pain of being touched feels like a balm.

If so, he pities her. And maybe he envies her too.

“I hate this place,” he mutters, almost to himself. “The things it does to us.”

“We all hate it,” Pigsy reminds him, not unkindly. “That’s why we’re here, doing what we do: to try and make it better.” When Monkey finally finds the strength to look back at him, he’s watching the others as well, and his smile is a little softer and a little less sad. “Does it matter if we think it’s wrong, if she finds comfort in it? The world’s changed, maybe the rules have too.”

“Maybe.” The word feels heavy, a weight on his tongue; it floods his mouth with the taste of metal. “Do you think…?”

He doesn’t finish. The question sputters out, choked and swallowed by the lightless air, regret turning the words sour in his mouth, but it doesn’t matter. He has said enough, and the shift in Pigsy’s expression, subtle but noticeable, says he’s heard it.

The smile falls off his face, twisting into something closer to pity, like the ache of someone who understands too much. Normally, Monkey would bristle to see such sickening softness turned on him, but he has already exposed too much of himself. What’s one final humiliation, on top of everything else?

Finally, and with a glint in his eye that brings more colour to the world than it should, Pigsy says, “Do I think you could find something like that for yourself? Or do I think Tripitaka would—”

“No!” The sharpness gives him away, though, and he concedes with a sigh; no-one can ever fool Pigsy anyway. “I don’t know. Both, maybe? I don’t…” He takes a moment to compose himself, to screw up his discomfort and toss it into a dusty corner of his mind, to pretend he knows no shame, then presses on in a rush: “If I want to survive in a world where humans are going to touch me whether I want them to or not, I have to learn to be okay with that, right? Have to learn to get used to it, at least. Right?”

“Suppose so.” It’s as ambivalent as anything Monkey’s ever heard. “Can’t hurt, can it?”

“Right.” He nods, more to himself than to Pigsy. “I won’t let them have another advantage. They have too many already.”

“Good for you.” He somehow manages to sound wry and sincere at the same time. “And Tripitaka?”

“I like the monk,” Monkey says, without hesitation. “And I trust him.”

He’s not ashamed of that. They all like Tripitaka, all three of them, and they would all trust him with their lives. That’s why they’re here in the first place, following him to the farthest corners of the world on some hopeless, impossible quest.

Pigsy knows that as well as he does. “Okay,” he says evenly, head cocked as if in encouragement.

Monkey sighs. But he’s come this far, and he has never been a coward. He steels his spine, squares his shoulders, and braces himself for painful honesty.

“But I liked and trusted the Master too, didn’t I? And he touched me and I touched him, and it was great.” His throat clenches, squeezing his voice until there’s nothing left of it. “But then he died. And suddenly it wasn’t.”

“Ah.” Simple and straightforward, but with an undercurrent of something deeper, a tragic sort of reverie that makes Monkey’s heart and head ache. “Well. Like I said before: new world, new rules. Maybe it’s time to embrace them, find comfort if you can. And you know Tripitaka’s not going anywhere…”

Monkey swallows, feeling the words like a blow, like the most unbearable pain.

“Neither was the Master,” he says in a broken whisper. “Until he did.”

*

He talks about it, briefly, with Sandy.

Very, _very_ briefly.

She’s only just started learning how to talk at all, so trying to have a conversation with her still feels rather like throwing words at the nearest wall and hoping in vain that one or two of them will come bouncing back to him.

A few do. Most don’t. It’s still an improvement.

He asks her what it feels like, being touched by Tripitaka. He asks if it’s different from being touched by other humans, if it still hurts even when she seeks out the contact herself, if it still hurts even when it’s _him_. He takes great care in phrasing himself, chooses the simplest words he can think of, and it still takes a dozen tries to get any kind of answer at all.

And when he does…

Well.

“Yes,” she says.

She’s in her water snake form — for some unfathomable reason, she finds that one the easiest for trying to speak — and so the word ends in a long, extended hiss.

Monkey bites his tongue. He’s learning to be patient with her, a task just as exhausting and laborious as her lessons in verbal communication, but it is difficult sometimes to stay calm when all he wants is a simple answer to what he foolishly assumed was a simple question.

“Yes to what?” he demands. “Yes, it hurts? Yes, it’s different? Yes, _what_?”

She furrows her brow, as best she can; in her present form, it’s vaguely comical. “Yes, different. Yes, hurts.” She flicks her tongue a few times, as though deep in thought, then adds, “Yes, both.”

“Then why do it?” Monkey asks, frustration overpowered for a moment by genuine curiosity. “If it hurts when he touches you, why do you let him do it in the first place? There must be less painful ways of connecting to him or whatever.”

“No.” Head cocked, she speaks with excruciating slowness, sounding out each syllable like it’s a terrible struggle; knowing her, it probably is. “Yes, painful. But comfortable too. See? Humans want to hurt us, try to hurt us. So they do. Tripitaka doesn’t want to hurt, tries not to hurt. So it hurts less. Wants to comfort, so it does.” She blinks up at him with huge, hopeful eyes, like a puppy begging for a treat after a job well done. “See? Tripitaka, she—”

“ _He_.” Monkey clenches his teeth; this isn’t the first, or even the tenth time they’ve been through this. “Tripitaka is a boy monk. You know that. I’ve explained it to you a thousand times.” She stares at him, dumb and confused, and he growls his frustration. “Look, it’s not complicated. You: she. Me: he. Tripitaka: _he_.”

Sandy continues to stare blankly at him for nearly a whole minute. Then, after what feels like an eternity, she shakes herself and says, “See.”

Monkey rolls his eyes, then steadies himself, and counts to ten, reestablishing his patience. Not so long ago, he reminds himself, she couldn’t say anything at all; it’s unfair to lose his temper every time she trips over something easy. He drags them both back to the present, to the matter at hand, and leaves the semantics in the dirt.

“Okay,” he says, keeping his jaw tense. “Let’s see if I’ve got this straight. You’re saying it hurts, but not as badly as it should, because his intentions are good? Is that it?”

She exhales, a hiss like a sigh, like she’s as frustrated with him as he is with her. “No. Saying _see_. Good for me, yes. You, maybe. But maybe not. Different. Feels different, hurts different. Everything different. Yes? So see. You and her.”

“Him! For the love of…” He waves the issue away. “Forget it. Stop trying to distract me.”

Sandy hisses again, disjointedly musical and rather pointed this time. If Monkey didn’t know better, he’d swear the little brat was laughing at him.

“ _See_ ,” she says again, then curls up in the grass and falls asleep.

*

He spends a couple more days thinking on that, and gathering his courage.

Not that he’s nervous, of course; he doesn’t get nervous. It’s just that they lead very busy lives, questing and journeying and not talking to each other about awkward things, et cetera, and there aren’t many opportunities to get the elusive little monk alone.

Not that he tries especially hard, if he’s honest. But that’s neither here nor there.

Finally, after a few long and frustrating days for everyone involved, Pigsy’s patience reaches its breaking point and he drags Sandy off to the nearby river. Ostensibly, he wants the weird little water dæmon to teach him how to swim. Monkey, however, being not nearly as stupid as he occasionally pretends to be, doesn’t need to hear his hasty over-the-shoulder “get on with it, already!” to read the deeper message.

Monkey has never been particularly talented at expressing himself, and even with nearly two weeks to prepare he still doesn’t really know where to begin. Pigsy might be right about the world and the rules changing while he was in the rock, might even be right about him needing to change with them, but even in a world as sullied and sordid as this one he can’t help thinking there might be certain connotations in looking a human in the eye and blurting out _‘Could you touch me, please?’_

Thus, he shoots for something with just a fraction more subtlety.

“So,” he says, with forced breeziness, “you’re a monk, right?”

Tripitaka blinks down at his robes, looking oddly uneasy. “Er?”

“Right, right. Stupid question, I know.”

So maybe it wasn’t the best ice-breaker.

He shuffles his feet, feeling the anxiety crawl its way up from his stomach to his throat, then stands and paces around the campfire a few times, trying to push it back down. It’s ridiculous, he knows; between the four of them they’ve shared every kind of humiliation any human or dæmon can imagine. And yet here he is, as shy and self-conscious as the day he moved to the Jade Mountain to live with the Master.

Tripitaka is still frowning down at his robes when Monkey dares to look at him again, fiddling anxiously with the hem, like he’s trying to hide a stain or something. Monkey waits until he’s finished, until he looks up and notices he’s watching, until he coughs and mumbles, as shy and awkward as Monkey suddenly feels, “You were saying?”

Monkey swallows his discomfort, for the monk’s sake more than his own. “I need some training,” he says, in what he hopes is a strong, authoritative sort of voice. “Monk training.”

“Er…” It’s the same kind of ‘er’ as before, like he’s somehow more edgy about this than Monkey is; that makes no sense, but hey, as long as he’s not the only one feeling that way. “You, um… I mean, what could I possibly teach you?”

And there it is: the opening he’s been waiting for, to split his heart in two and spill out all his dark, sordid secrets, to lay himself down on the ground and hope the little monk doesn’t trample him to death.

It’s a terrifying thing, exposing his weaknesses, the fear of contact, the fear of trust, the fear of everything, to open himself up and admit that he needs to be better, braver, stronger, to evolve and adapt to this world that would crush him given half a chance, to take a deep breath and say out loud that he doesn’t want to be afraid any more.

He doesn’t know where to begin. He—

He wants to say: _‘I want you to touch me because I trust you and I want that trust to become something real and physical_.’

And he wants to say: _‘I want you to touch me so I’m not so afraid of being touched by humans who don’t deserve my fear.’_

And he wants to say: _‘I want both of those things at the same time, and I don’t know which one terrifies me more.’_

But of course he doesn’t say any of that.

What he does say, voice rising with a bitterness he doesn’t really feel, is: “You taught _her_ how to let humans touch her.”

Tripitaka blinks, visibly thrown, and it takes a long moment for his mind to catch up and find the unexpected place Monkey is trying to steer him.

“You mean Sandy?” he asks at last, frowning his confusion. Monkey nods, then immediately feels like an idiot when the monk shakes his head. “I didn’t teach her that. The Scholar might have? I never thought to ask.”

Monkey flounders. “But you… she…”

“I didn’t teach her anything,” Tripitaka says with a shrug. “She’s just always let me touch her. Like… I don’t know, like instinct.”

Monkey sighs. Easy for a fractured little thing like Sandy, he supposes with some bitterness. Starved all her life of any kind of contact, any kind of connection at all. He wonders if Pigsy was right after all, when he guessed that the pain of being touched is, for her, simply less than the pain of being so deprived for so long. Well, she did tell him, didn’t she, that it would be different with him; ‘deprived’ is about the last thing he is. In fact, it’s almost the opposite.

Still, he does not back down. He’s made his start, and he’ll run with it.

“So teach me to be like that,” he says to Tripitaka, crossing his arms in his most effortlessly human way. “The humans here think they can scare me by touching me. They think it makes me weak. But if she’s not afraid of them, I won’t be either.”

Tripitaka opens his mouth, then seems to think better of whatever he was going to say and promptly shuts it again. He furrows his brow, like he’s trying to take in what Monkey is asking, possibly trying to catch a few of the words he’s not saying — the words he is making a conscious, effortful point of not saying — then gives up with a weary shrug.

“Is this about what happened to the two of you?” he asks. “When you were captured and—”

“No.” The sharpness stings them both; he bites down hard, then tries again. “I don’t know. Maybe?”

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Tripitaka says sagely. “You come from a world where it’s the most horrible violation to be touched by a human. Of course you’d be disturbed by what happened to you. Of course you would need time to recover, physically and emotionally. Sandy doesn’t… she’s never known that world, or that revulsion. You can’t compare your reaction to hers; you both have different experiences, different world-views. I’m sure there are many things that frighten her that you wouldn’t even think twice about. It doesn’t make you less.”

“I know that,” Monkey scoffs, then sobers. “But it does make me weak. They’re not wrong about that.” Admitting it comes with great difficulty, but it also reminds him of why he’s doing this in the first place. “It makes me _vulnerable_.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Tripitaka says, though he knows better than to chase that particular point. “But if it’s something you’d like to work on, I’d be honoured to try and help you, in any way I can.”

Monkey peers at him, eyes narrowed, searching for signs of deception or judgement, but finds nothing but openness and warmth. For a human with no dæmon, Tripitaka has more soul than anyone he has ever met.

It’s a good opening to bring up the other thing, the trust thing, the wanting-to-connect-with-him-personally thing, the part where this has a deeper meaning. Monkey hopes the little human knows that part already, hopes that he understands this is about _him_ and _them_ as much as it is about the world they live in and the humans who have corrupted it, but still a part of him wants to make it obvious, to say the words and give them the weight they deserve.

But of course, secret coward that he is, he doesn’t. Somehow, the idea of just saying it feels almost more intimate than the idea of touching him at all.

“Good,” he says instead, venting some of his self-directed frustration into a moody huff. “Because you’re the reason I’m stuck in this stupid world in the first place. It’s your job to teach me how to live in it.”

Tripitaka stares at him sort of sideways, like he can see the bravado and isn’t fooled for a second. Still, he knows better than to point it out.

“I can do that,” he says instead, in the halting voice of someone desperately trying to navigate his way through a minefield. “Anything you need, Monkey. Anything you…” He trails off quickly, before he can let slip the word ‘want’. “Anything.”

 _Good_ , Monkey doesn’t say again. He stands up as straight as he can, hands clasped in front of him, trying to look the part of a model student.

The Master used to make him stand that way sometimes, straight and stiff and perfectly still, for training and meditation; good posture made for good discipline, he would say, for good attentiveness and good performance. He used to say ‘good’ a lot, Monkey remembers now, with a sorrowful pang, and it is with an image of his face in his mind, stern but warm, that he takes a deep breath and steps forwards.

“Okay,” he says, sticking out his chest. “Do your worst, little monk.”

Tripitaka blinks, taken aback. “What? You want to do this now?”

“When else?” He glances over his shoulder, uneasy but definitely — _definitely_ — not self-conscious. “This is personal. Private. I don’t want the two idiots around to see it.”

He keeps to himself the part where they’ve already talked about it, where the two idiots already know more about this than Tripitaka does. He doesn’t want to give away that he’s actually spent more than a few minutes thinking about it at all, that the request has come from more than just a whim or a stray thought, a moment of weakness brought on by his captivity. Maybe he’ll confess that part later, once they’ve perfected this, once he has been touched and offered his own touches in return, once he’s felt the sting of contact by choice for the first time in five hundred years and not watched the world fall apart immediately after.

If that ever happens.

His throat is suddenly very, very dry.

He swallows.

His arms are shaking; he can feel the vibrations all the way down to his bones, even as he tries to stop them, so he tightens his shoulders, stiffens his spine, tries to recite all the silly little mantras that the Master taught him, tries to keep the tremors on the inside if he cannot still them completely.

_Honour, patience, respect, discipline. Honour, patience…_

Tripitaka steps forward, looking nervous and uncomfortable, watching him with hooded eyes, like maybe he’s reciting a mantra or two of his own. Monkey can see the fear playing across his smooth young features, a very different fear to the one gnawing in his belly, though no less overpowering. Not fear of contact — he’s intimately acquainted with that, Monkey knows, and comfortable too — but because he knows what the contact will do to _him_ , fear because he does not want to be the human responsible for a dæmon’s pain.

It is touching. More than contact, it takes hold of Monkey’s heart and squeezes tight until he can’t breathe, until he can’t—

He flinches, jerking backwards as the monk takes another step towards him. His breath seems to stop in his throat, his chest, a pulse of pain that precludes the contact, powerful and potent, like—

Like Tripitaka’s hand, trembling and tentative, hovering uneasily in the space between them, has suddenly caught fire, igniting the air, sending sparks and ashes right into Monkey’s lungs.

Monkey gasps, choking on imaginary smoke, and takes a long, stumbling step back.

Tripitaka withdraws instantly, lightning-quick and automatic. He stares down at his hand, frowning his confusion, and takes great care not to look at Monkey at all, like he knows he needs privacy and space.

“Did I do something wrong?” he asks, voice shaking slightly.

 _Of course not,_ Monkey tries to say, sharp-edged and sullen.

But the words catch in his throat, still so unbearably dry, burned to cinders by the aborted contact, and what comes out instead is something wholly and unfairly different:

“Dammit, monk, you came at me too fast!”

Not sharp but sort of jagged, a hoarse rasp that gives away much more than he intended to.

Tripitaka flinches, at his tone far more than the words, pulling back a little himself now, like the accusation was a blow, a fist shoved through his chest. 

Guilt tugs at the corners of Monkey’s heart, twisting his nerves until they’re even keener than they already are, but he shoves the feeling aside, drives it back down by sheer force of will. His old reflexes are kicking in, defence mechanisms that even the Master could never fully break him of, and he sweeps his tail out in front of him, a dervish and a barrier all at once.

Tripitaka has his hands up, a mark of surrender. On another day, it might have worked, bringing Monkey back to himself, but in light of what they’re trying to accomplish here, it’s the worst thing he could do. They seem to fill the space between them completely, those hands, small but still so terrifyingly powerful, and Monkey lurches a few more steps back.

Distance, he thinks feverishly. He has to keep his distance, he can’t let those hands reach him, can’t let them find him, touch him, can’t let himself feel too much, can’t let—

“I’m sorry,” Tripitaka is mumbling, looking sort of frenzied now. “I didn’t realise you were… that is, I…”

He trails off, eyes widening as they fix on Monkey’s face, his tight jaw and his wild eyes. Monkey has no memory of baring his teeth, but all of a sudden they’re gnashing together so tightly it hurts. He tries to bring his body and mind back under control, but there’s nothing he can do for either of them now; he’s too much a victim of his reflexes, just as he always was at the Jade Mountain, when the Master would try and teach him discipline but found only anger.

There was no reason for it back then, not really. Just a wild young dæmon who didn’t know how good he had it, impatient and rebellious, the body of a monkey and a soul that yearned to be a man’s.

He has no reason to be angry now either, he knows. Tripitaka is only doing what Monkey asked him to, nothing more. And yet Monkey’s body is responding as if he were a threat, as if he were—

He stumbles back, then back some more, back and back and back, until the whole campsite stands between them, until there is so much space no-one could ever breach it and touch him. He’s shaking all over, he notices hazily, but he doesn’t realise how bad it is until the fear on Tripitaka’s face bleeds out into something kinder and sweeter and wholly unwelcome.

 _Pity_.

Monkey tries to feel enraged, to hiss and snarl and scratch, to defend himself against the wash of humanity, of warmth, of too much feeling, but his body still won’t respond to his commands; he can’t lift his arms, and his legs won’t stop dragging him backwards. He is moving, breathing, _reacting_ , but it’s all happening independently, without his consent.

“This was a stupid idea.” The voice is his, he’s sure, but he has no memory of saying the words; his tongue has gone completely numb, his throat razed and parched, but the words are there, pouring out of him utterly uncontrolled, wild and loose and delirious. “This was stupid—”

And he spins on his heels, dizzy and disoriented, and the forest floor seems to spin and twist beneath his feet, trying to bring him down, trying to pull his balance and equilibrium apart.

He can hear Tripitaka behind him, calling his name, voice shaking with fear and worry, so high it’s almost unrecognisable, not monkish at all, but something else, something softer—

And Monkey covers his ears to block it out, the voice and the name and everything else, and he squeezes his eyes shut to block out the memory of those delicate monk’s hands, small and gentle, too fragile to do anyone any harm, definitely too fragile to do _him_ any harm—

But as he shuts out the moment in front of him, he finds himself face-to-face with the one he left behind, the Master’s hands, so much older than Tripitaka’s, so much stronger, wet with blood—

Monkey trips, falls, hits the ground hard. Staggers back up without a thought, desperate, terrified, even as a voice in his head whispers that he’s being ridiculous, that there is nothing to be afraid of, that he is trying to run away from the only good thing this evil world ever created, the only good thing to happen to him since all that death and pain stole the colour from a better world, from his world. The first glimmer of light he’s found, and he’s turning around and running away, running like a coward, a weakling, like—

Like a dæmon with no human.

Which he is. Which he always was and always will be.

Stupid to imagine he could change that.

Stupid back then, when the world was beautiful.

Stupider now, when he knows it’s not.

And so he turns on his heels, wild and blinded by memory, and he runs for his life, from the very person who saved it.

*

He hides, like a real monkey, up a tree.

Clinging to the trunk, tail wrapped around the branch below him, trembling more than he’d ever let any of the others see. It is shameful, how long it takes to come back to himself, to catch his breath and recapture his wandering senses; he is not a coward, despite what his body just made him do, but he is grateful beyond words for the solitude and still air, the quiet, comfortable certainty that he is all alone.

It’s not something he seeks out often, solitude. But then, it’s not often he feels helpless or frightened like this, either. Monkey has always prided himself on his courage, his ability to withstand anything, to meet head-on any threat, any warning, any conflict or confrontation; even with his fear of touching humans gripping him at every turn, he has never turned away from a fight. He is not a coward. He is _not_ —

But here he is, halfway up a tree, quivering like a scared little child, like an unsettled dæmon, tiny and twitching and terrified.

He doesn’t know how long he spends up there, how many minutes or hours pass before he stops feeling quite so vulnerable, before the shock and horror start to fade and leave behind the acrid taste of humiliation, but it is long enough that the sun has started its descent to below the treeline, that the glare has started to sting in his eyes, colourless and bland just like everything else in this world, another reminder of where he is and what he has lost, where even sunlight can’t dazzle him any more.

He has no reason to assume that Tripitaka would worry for him, no reason to believe the poor monk would feel anything except rejection and shame after what Monkey just put him through. He knows that he would surely feel those things himself if their positions were reversed; he would be angry, frustrated, and quite content to let the stubborn, overreacting idiot spend the whole damn night in a tree if he wanted.

But he is not Tripitaka, and Tripitaka is not like him. Tripitaka has patience and dignity; he is a gentle soul who feels strongly and cares deeply, and he would never leave a friend to suffer alone.

Monkey knows this, of course. And he is not surprised at all, as the sun continues to sink, drifting almost beneath his eyeline, to hear a high human voice calling his name from below the tree.

It is shame, not stubbornness, that keeps Monkey from responding.

Tripitaka, of course, doesn’t take kindly to being ignored. Monkey knows this perfectly well by now, and he doesn’t bother trying to flee again when he hears the telltale huff and grumble of a tiny human body trying to scale a very large tree, willing to skin his hands and knees if it means making a point.

In his own way, Tripitaka is just as stubborn as Monkey is — as stubborn as they all are, each in their own way, even the usually-placid Pigsy — and by the time he has clambered his way up through the branches to where Monkey is perched, he is bedraggled and sweaty, and his robes are torn and smudged with dirt.

Monkey raises a brow, swallowing down the apologies that want to spill from his tongue. “I would’ve come back down eventually,” he remarks, as coolly as he can given the situation. “You could’ve just sat there and waited.”

Tripitaka shrugs. His face is glowing a little with exertion; under the dying sunlight, his youth is readily apparent. He is too young and soft, Monkey thinks, for a world as cruel as this.

“It’s fine,” Tripitaka says; his smile is tired but triumphant. “I used to love climbing.”

 _Used to_.

It’s a heavy phrase, and Monkey feels the weight of it all the more on a branch just about ready to give out.

He means _before the quest_ , and he means _before you_ , and maybe he also means before whatever terrible thing happened to his friend and mentor the Scholar, the nameless tragedy that brought him to Monkey’s rock in the first place. Monkey has seen the grief painting its shadows under his eyes in the quiet hours when he thinks no-one is looking, and he knows exactly how much that ‘used to’ means to a small, sad monk.

He doesn’t know whether he should say any of that out loud, though. He doesn’t know if he should say anything at all; if he can’t muster an apology, does he even deserve to speak?

Probably not. But when has that ever stopped him before?

And so like the clumsy idiot he is, he blurts out, without thinking, “Good for you.”

Tripitaka stares at him for a beat, chewing the inside of his cheek like he desperately wants to make a remark about that. Hanging his head a little, Monkey concedes he would deserve it.

Blessedly, the monk seems to think better of it, shaking off the point with all the patience Monkey has come to expect of him by now, and instead uses his energies to shuffle a little closer to the branch.

Not close enough to join him — the branch is strong and broad enough that it could hold both of them easily enough, but he doesn’t seem to want to invade Monkey’s personal space just yet — but close enough to look him in the eye. Close enough, rather more significantly, that Monkey can’t try to flee, that there is no escape route that wouldn’t bring their bodies into contact.

Clever. Not that Monkey is planning on running away again, of course, but given his current record he can hardly blame Tripitaka for assuming he would.

“So,” the monk says, after a quiet moment, “do you want to talk about it?”

He’s speaking in the same soft, soothing voice he uses to try and calm Sandy when she’s upset or in pain. Monkey does not take kindly to being treated like _her_ , like they’re anything alike, like they ever could be. But her agitation in those moments is not so far from what he’s feeling right now, and so the monk’s gentle tone sort of works.

He feels adrift, disconnected and untethered, like the world is flowing and churning under his feet, like he can’t find purchase and can’t hold himself together. And, much like Sandy at her most agitated and vulnerable, Monkey wants nothing in the world more than to throw himself into Tripitaka’s arms and let him offer comfort in the purest, most physical way there is.

But he can’t. He _can’t_. And that—

That’s the damn problem, isn’t it?

He blows out a breath, then snaps, venting all his pent-up frustration and self-loathing, “This was a really stupid idea.”

Tripitaka doesn’t recoil like Monkey expects him to. Maybe he’s past the point of reacting to Monkey’s dramatics by now, or else he’s come prepared and has already braced himself for it. Either way, he holds his ground, clinging to the tree-trunk like it’s the only thing standing between him and a messy death — like Monkey would ever let that happen, even if it did mean touching him — and studying him through narrowed eyes.

“Why do you think that?” he asks, characteristically and disgustingly patient. “Did you really expect everything to fall miraculously into place the first time you tried?”

That’s probably the stupidest question Monkey has ever heard, and he takes a not-insubstantial measure of satisfaction in glaring at him.

“Of course I did,” he hisses, annoyed. “Everything _always_ falls into place the first time I try it. You may not be aware of this, but I’m kind of an expert.”

“An expert,” Tripitaka echoes, woefully unmoved. “In everything?”

“In _everything_.” He flexes his muscles to drive the point home, feeling the tension abate a little as Tripitaka flinches, visibly afraid that he’ll fall. “Relax, little monk. I’m made for climbing trees, remember? I could do a back-flip right now and land not two steps from where I am, without even breaking a sweat.”

And just to prove the point, he does.

Predictably, Tripitaka blanches even paler, clinging a little tighter to the trunk. “Point made,” he squeaks, a little faintly, then gazes mournfully down at the ground. “Can we go back down now? You know… for the weak little human’s sake?”

Monkey tries very hard not to smirk. “Whatever happened to ‘used to enjoy climbing’?” he wheedles.

“It met _you_ ,” Tripitaka huffs.

And there is very little Monkey can say to counter that.

*

Back on solid ground, they sit together under the tree.

There’s barely a hand’s space between them, and Monkey feels the closeness of Tripitaka’s body like the twisting edge of a blade, dull in one moment and then sharp in the next, cleaving the air in harmony with the monk’s breath, moving it in rhythm with his limbs, his voice, the heart he’s wearing on his frayed sleeve.

“Monkey,” he says, still low but not quite so gentle; he seems to realise that gentleness does not have the same effect on Monkey as it has on Sandy. “It’s okay to struggle, you know. It’s okay to find things difficult, even painful, even paralysing. Touching humans… it’s unnatural to you. Of course you’d be upset, trying it for the first time. Of course you’d be frightened.”

Just hearing the word makes the hair stand up all over Monkey’s body, makes him bare his teeth and wish he had claws to cut the letters apart. “I’m not _frightened_ ,” he grits out. “I’m _cautious_. I’m _uncomfortable_.”

“Those things too,” Tripitaka says evenly. “I know failure isn’t something you’re used to, Monkey, but that doesn’t make it any less normal. You’re going against your nature, against everything you’ve believed, everything you once held sacred. The world has changed since you and the Master were friends, since you forged your connection and—”

“Don’t!” It comes out like a plea, almost a sob, and Monkey hates himself so, so much for letting it happen. “That has nothing to do with this! Why are you bringing it up now?”

Tripitaka’s eyes grow damp and very dark.

“I think it has a lot to do with it,” he says, very quietly. “You touched him, didn’t you? Even though he wasn’t your human, even though you weren’t truly connected. You cared for him, trusted him, bonded with him so deeply that it didn’t repulse you to touch him. It meant more to you, being able to touch him and connect with him, than the thought that doing such a thing might be wrong. So you did. You touched him, and you connected with him, and it was good. Wasn’t it?”

Monkey’s blood feels like it’s boiling in his veins, like the moment before a volcanic eruption, like the wrong word or the wrong thought might cause it to burst out of him like some unstoppable cataclysm.

“Yeah,” he manages in a hoarse, incoherent murmur. “It was.”

Tripitaka’s expression softens, sad but sweet at the same time; for the briefest moment, under the setting sun, Monkey imagines he sees flecks of colour coming alive under his skin, life and soul and beauty all born anew.

Then it’s gone, vanished as Tripitaka says, “So what changed?”

 _Isn’t it obvious,_ Monkey thinks bitterly, but the briefest glance at Tripitaka’s face says it’s not, says that he really, truly doesn’t see, doesn’t understand.

It’s just contact to him. Just touch; nothing more, nothing less. He knows that it makes dæmons like Monkey and Pigsy feel viscerally uncomfortable, knows what he’s read in his old scrolls and old books, whatever biased nonsense these dæmonless new-world humans wrote down about the old ways, but he doesn’t understand how it feels to live that way. How could he, when he is so young and so unfamiliar with everything that once made up the world?

Monkey closes his eyes, but does not turn away this time. He can feel the warmth of Tripitaka’s body like a beacon or a furnace, a threat in one moment and an invitation in the next; it both thrills and disgusts him. The thought of being touched is a nightmare thing, but not nearly as much as the answer to his question, the horror bubbling and burning in his chest, the weakness in his bones, his limbs, in every part of him. The Master’s face shimmers before his mind’s eye, dæmonless just like Tripitaka, and just as colourful too.

 _What changed,_ Tripitaka asks, and Monkey looks down at his hollow, bodiless form and thinks, _can’t you see?_

“He died,” he whispers, a confession that bleeds between their worlds. “That’s what changed. He died, and I didn’t.”

For a long, painful moment, it looks like Tripitaka still doesn’t understand. Then his expression clears, confusion giving way to a desperate sort of grief, a personal pain that has everything and nothing to do with Monkey’s. Thinking of his own lost master, perhaps, the Scholar he talks about so often and with such fondness and sorrow. Monkey doesn’t know much about their relationship, but he knows that it ran terribly deep.

Different, though. It’s always different, a friendship between humans. Simple by necessity, straightforward and comfortable, none of the complexities that come with having — or not having — dæmons.

Tripitaka feels a terrible weight of guilt for his Scholar’s death, this Monkey knows very well, but that’s all it is: guilt, and nothing more. Guilt that he could not save him, guilt that he survived when the man he saw as more deserving did not. Guilt, a thousand shades and a thousand colours, but still, in the end, just guilt.

It is different for Monkey. His friendship with the Master was different, and so too is his pain, the grief of a mourning dæmon completely different to the grief and guilt of a human burying another of his kind.

When Monkey bows his head and confesses that he did not die when the Master did, he doesn’t mean, as Tripitaka does, _I wish I’d died instead of my friend, I wish he could live on in my place_. He feels those things as well, of course — guilt at having been the one to escape unhurt, shame because he couldn’t do anything to help, and grief because he must now go on alone — but that isn’t what he means.

He means: _I was supposed to be his dæmon, I was supposed to die with him_.

But of course, that was never really true, was it?

Monkey was never the Master’s dæmon, not really. He just let himself pretend and believe and imagine, lived a lie and then wondered why the rest of the world turned around and made it true.

He bows his head, fists clenching in spasms in his lap, and he wants so desperately to cry for the friend he lost and the world he ruined, but he can no more cry in front of Tripitaka than he can lean in and let their shoulders or fingertips brush against each other, no more than he can look into his eyes and pretend that he is this monk’s dæmon now instead.

He cannot look to Tripitaka as a substitute for his Master. He cannot—

No.

He _will_ not.

He—

He is _afraid_.

He—

He thinks of the twisted, soulless humans that wander the world now, the empty creatures who would kill or sever a dæmon and think they were doing the right thing, who would do the most unspeakable things to their own souls and never even realise the damage they’d wrought.

He thinks of those monsters, the bandits who captured him and tied him to a rock, who touched him with their bare, filthy hands and never spared a thought for the evil they were committing; he remembers waking, sickened down to his bones, his blood, his everything, violated in a way he had never known before. He thinks of the humans who would touch a dæmon in cruelty and violence, who would sever a newborn child from his soul, who would do these things as if they were natural.

He thinks of the humans this world has made, and he feels angry and full of hate. And the parts of him that remember how those touches felt burn again now with the need to be better, stronger, to never feel that helpless again.

He feels so many things when he thinks of those humans, so much violence and brutality, but the one thing he does not feel — not now, not ever again — is fear. The thought of being touched by them again makes him feel physically sick, drives him almost to the edge of madness; it makes his insides churn and burn and burst, but it does not make him feel afraid.

And then he looks at Tripitaka, the first human in five hundred years to look at him with warmth and faith and affection, the first human in all that time to make him feel anything at all. He looks at this sad, bedraggled little monk, and he wants so badly to touch his hand and his heart, and—

And all of a sudden, he is terrified.

Tripitaka is still watching him, quiet and patient, as though waiting for permission to speak. Monkey wants to turn his face away, turn his whole body away, turn and run again, leave the poor monk in the dust for the second time in as many hours. He feels shaky and horrible, he feels twisted and tainted inside, and he doesn’t want Tripitaka to see that side of him.

Before he gets a chance to act on those instincts again, however, Tripitaka whispers his name, “Monkey,” as soft and sad as a mourning prayer.

Monkey clenches his jaw. “Like I said,” he mutters, gritting his teeth to drive back the tears, “this was a stupid idea.”

“I don’t think it was,” Tripitaka says quietly. “I really don’t, Monkey.”

He closes his eyes, then, as if in meditation or prayer, harrowed and hallowed at the same time. Monkey watches the emotions play across his fine, delicate features, and wonders if he knows how open he is like this, how exposed. When his eyes are open, he’s as shrouded as any human without a dæmon, hidden behind a soul that doesn’t exist, but like this, it’s like he’s laying his soul bare, at least as much of one as he has hidden inside himself, where no blade can sever it. Monkey feels honoured to see him like this, and very afraid.

“You don’t understand,” he whispers, hating himself for following Tripitaka’s example, for opening up and exposing his weaknesses instead of protecting himself from them like he wants to. “You can’t. You’re human. You’ll never know how it feels to lose someone who was a part of your soul. To live on, to survive when every part of you wants— no, _needs_ to go with him.”

“I understand it better than you might think,” Tripitaka says in a strange, low voice. His eyes flick open as he speaks, and the openness washes away, like a door slammed shut in the middle of a conversation. “The Scholar may have been human, but he was my family. The only family I ever knew. My whole life, he raised me, taught me, made me into everything I am. Losing someone like that… it’s not different just because neither of us was a dæmon.”

Monkey scoffs his disbelief. “It’s totally different,” he argues. “You’re not afraid to touch other humans.”

Tripitaka’s reaction is so subtle Monkey almost misses it. He peers at him, eyes narrowed, suddenly on guard, like he’s trying to decide how much of his own pain to share, how much he is able to put himself through again. Monkey feels guilty, forcing him to think about this — he knows from his own experience how terrible it is — and he is just about to tell him to forget it when Tripitaka raises a hand to silence him.

“That depends,” he says, very slowly, “on your definition of ‘touch’.”

Monkey blinks, taken aback. As far as he’s aware, there is only one definition: skin on skin or fur or feathers or fins, whatever form a dæmon takes. Physicality, the press of hands or bodies, _contact_.

“What do you mean?” he asks, sincere in his confusion.

Tripitaka sighs. This is obviously a deeply personal subject for him, and deeply painful as well, but he swallows his emotions as best he can and tries to speak with an even, patient tone.

“It’s not just…” He closes his eyes, breathes steadily. “With humans, at least… maybe with dæmons as well, I don’t know… it’s not just about physical contact. A person can touch another person’s heart, can touch their mind or their soul, and leave their prints inside them without ever having touched their body. The Scholar was like that for me. I think the Master would have been like that for you. Even if you’d never touched him physically.”

“I…” Monkey frowns, trying to absorb that. “Maybe, yeah.”

Tripitaka smiles, fond and sort of tragic, then presses on. “When you lose someone like that, someone who touches you inside as well as outside… the loss, it can…” His throat convulses, emotion overpowering him, and he turns his face away. “It can make you afraid to get close to others. Physically or emotionally. Afraid to touch their hearts or their souls, maybe even more than their bodies.”

It shouldn’t feel like some great revelation, but somehow it does.

Monkey has never thought about the world that way, has never thought about feeling or emotion as something so close to touching. Why would he? In his world, the world he remembers, it was simple and straightforward: a human body and a dæmon soul, nothing more or less. 

The two have always been, at least in his mind, intrinsically linked; there was never any need to dissect their feelings for each other because they were one and the same. Trying to do so now, finding new connections between two things he once thought were wholly different, emotional and physical contact, the body and the heart… his head aches.

And so does the place in his chest where he imagines the Master’s spirit still resides.

“I don’t want to feel that way again,” he says, low and confessional. “When he died, it was like feeling the life bleed out of me too, but I didn’t get to die. I had to stay alive, had to watch as his life ended and took mine with it, only I was still breathing. I don’t…” His voice shakes, but he doesn’t try to still it; somehow, he suspects the Master wouldn’t mind the lack of discipline this time. “I don’t want that to happen again. I don’t want to have to look down at _you_ and…”

He stops. He’s not quite flushing, but it’s close enough to make his teeth clench and the words cut off.

He is ashamed and he is angry with himself, not just for letting the confession slip but for being weak enough to feel that way in the first place: to accept, deep inside himself, that he already cares, that he is already afraid of losing Tripitaka like he did the Master. Whether or not they ever touch like he wants, it seems that Tripitaka is right: he’s already touched him in the places that matter. The damage, it seems, is done.

Tripitaka is smiling, seeming to read all of that in the space between what Monkey has said and what he will not. Sad and touched by grief, but still, a smile that lights up the fading sky.

“It’s a frightening thing,” he says, “letting yourself be touched.”

He doesn’t only mean physically. Monkey knows this, and for the first time he thinks he understands. He can feel the words and their meanings tugging at his broken heart, his lost soul, all of him.

“Safer to be alone,” he mutters, fighting a sudden sting behind his eyes. “Maybe I should just give it up, then. Better to give them the advantage, those soulless things that call themselves ‘human’, than risk hurting like that again.”

Tripitaka flinches a little at that, like the words have struck him physically. “I don’t…”

“It’s true,” Monkey presses, willing himself to believe it, willing one of them to. “They’ll both make you weak in the end, right? So maybe I shouldn’t bother trying to get over it. Maybe I should just carry on like I always have. Be quicker and tougher, keep a safe distance, don’t let them get close. They can’t touch me if I don’t let them, right?” His breath stalls in his chest, a sharp pain like a knife between his ribs. “They can’t make me vulnerable if I don’t let them. They can’t, they…”

His voice gives out, though, taking the last of his breath with it. He turns away, unwilling to face the look on Tripitaka’s face, the quiet empathy, the too-deep understanding.

“Do you really believe that?”

Quiet, gentle. It hurts more than if he’d lashed him with the words like a whip. And isn’t the answer obvious?

Monkey swallows thickly, waiting for his breath and his voice to return to him. He looks down at his open palms, monkey’s hands blessed with human talent, and wonders if his life would have been easier if he’d been born human, if he’d never known what it means to be a dæmon.

“I guess there’s always going to be one lucky idiot, right?” he sighs at last. “Some ass who catches me on a bad day, and lands a hit?”

“Right.” Tripitaka smiles, seeing through the parchment-thin façade, as Monkey knew he would. “Pain always finds a way to get under our skin, whether we want it to or not. I don’t think it’s really possible to escape it completely.” His experience weighs heavily, thickening the words, making their meanings cut even deeper. “All we can do is prepare ourselves for it, as best we can.”

It’s an invitation, Monkey knows, and an offer as well. He’s saying that he will be patient, that he will wait, that he will always have a hand held out for him, ready for the moment he feels ready to take it. He’s saying that Monkey’s fleeting panic won’t stop him from trying to help, that he will be there for as long as Monkey wants him to be. Even if that turns out to be never, even if he’s not brave enough.

And maybe there’s something else to it as well, an acknowledgement of his own pain, his own grief.

They will never be truly alike, a dæmon and a human, even if their grief mirrors each other’s, but they have both lost parts of themselves. Tripitaka understands just as Monkey does, how terrifying it is to stand on the edge of trusting, caring, loving someone again, to open himself up to loss and grief, knowing that it is inevitable, that it will come sooner or later, that neither one of them can promise the other that they won’t die too.

Still, even knowing that as intimately as he does, Tripitaka lays himself open. One hand in his lap, the other stretched out to fill the space between their bodies, there for Monkey to take if he wants to, or ignore if he’s still not ready. A promise that he will give everything he can, everything he has, because he knows just as keenly as Monkey does how badly the alternative hurts. A gentler pain, one given with love and kindness, to temper the one still burning in both of their chests.

Monkey looks down at Tripitaka’s hand, his upturned palm, his slender, outstretched fingers, and wonders what the skin would feel like pressed to his own. The Master was older, his hands calloused from work and worn with wear; Tripitaka is so young, so untested; there are times when Monkey wonders if he’s even gone through puberty. If he had a dæmon of his own, would she have settled yet? Would his hands be smooth to the touch, a mark of his inexperience, or hardened by the loss of his mentor, the grief clouding his heart? Would his fingers feel as fragile as they look, wrapped around his own, or do they hold some hidden strength? Would—

He closes his eyes, holds his breath, and silently takes his hand.

It feels—

It is—

It—

It is just like touching the Master again, but also nothing like it at all. It is a skittering sensation inside his nerves and his bones, like the fading shimmer of colour behind his eyelids as he drifts off to sleep, the memory of a world that loved him. Touching the Master was never painful, not until the day he died, the day Monkey touched his lifeless, bloodless hands and realised that it was wrong. But this, five hundred years later, a new human and a new world, new rules and a new understanding of what it means to be a dæmon with no human… this _hurts_.

But not like he expects.

Not like violation or violence or brutality, not like any kind of pain he’s ever known. There is nothing of the razed, invaded feeling that filled him when he woke tied to the rock, to the nightmare sensation of having been touched without permission. This hurts like putting his hands into a rich, purifying fire, into something he knows is there to cleanse him and make him strong. It has to hurt, it must, because how else can he know that it is beautiful?

For a long, long time, all he can do is breathe it in and soak it up, absorb the sensation like he’s absorbing a new part of himself. Skin on his skin, contact, physicality, _touch_ , and the echo inside his head and his heart, the memory of what it feels like to be safe, to feel loved and wanted and cared for, a shadow of how it might feel to have a human of his own, to be connected, to be tethered. It is rough and raw and so new, too much and not enough at the same time. It hurts, yes, but it hurts in the way of the first breath of air after nearly drowning.

He looks up at Tripitaka, seeks his face through tear-blurred eyes, seeks his smile and his warmth, his astonishing strength.

His eyes are as warm and dark and beautiful as ever, and so is his smile, the unspoken promises behind his lips, but they are different now, transformed. _He_ is different, he is transformed, he is—

He is—

No.

 _She_.

Monkey yanks back his hand, stunned by the revelation almost more than the sensation. His mouth opens and closes, independent of the rest of his body, and for a long moment he can only stare.

Tripitaka is staring too, shaking and impossibly vulnerable. Eyes dark, face pale, every inch of him — no, _her_ — burning with shame, with sorrow, with more emotions than Monkey has ever seen in one person at one time. His body gives away so many new details, but none so clear as what Monkey has already felt, the truth trembling inside her skin.

“Monkey…” His voice — _her_ voice — has become something wholly different, transformed along with the rest of her. It’s so obvious now, he can’t believe he didn’t hear it before. “Monkey, I’m sorry, I…”

Monkey shakes his head, mostly for his own sake, to clear it, and holds up a hand to quiet her. Peering into the spaces between his own fingers, they look a little different now, too, sort of glowing, like they’ve drawn power from the contact, from the moment, from Tripitaka.

“You…” He sounds hoarse, strangled. He clears his throat and tries again, no less at a loss than he was before. “ _How_?”

Tripitaka looks utterly lost, so broken and frightened that Monkey almost wants to reach out and touch her again. Almost.

Not yet, though. Not until—

“I had no choice,” she whispers. “The real Tripitaka — the monk who should have freed you in my place — he was killed along with the Scholar. There was no-one else. No other survivors, no other monks. No-one at all. The whole monastery was razed, everyone gone. I was the only survivor, the only one left. And I didn’t know what else to do.”

Monkey isn’t sure the explanation clarifies things very much. He understands the need to hide, of course, to use another’s identity as a shroud, protection from whatever heinous souls would kill a monastery full of monks… but to keep such a secret for so long? Did she really believe her dæmons wouldn’t sense the truth once they got close enough? Did she really think he wouldn’t, eventually, want to—

To—

He closes his eyes, swallows down the thought. Breathing slowly, raggedly, he finds a shred of the Master’s discipline, wraps it around his heart like a tourniquet and holds tight.

“Did you know?” he asks, urgency tightening his voice. He doesn’t know why it matters — in the grand scheme of all this, he knows it shouldn’t — but suddenly it feels like the most important question in the whole world. “Did you know that touching me would… that it would mean revealing yourself?”

Even as he asks, he realises he already knows the answer. Sandy has been calling the monk ‘she’ for as long as she’s been able to talk. Stunted as the odd little dæmon is in every way, Monkey naturally assumed it was a lack of comprehension on her part, that she simply couldn’t grasp the difference, but now he knows better, and it hits him like a blow.

She knew. The whole time, she knew. The little weirdo can’t even string a damn sentence together, but still she knew — has always known, it seems — exactly who Tripitaka is, and exactly what he is not.

Monkey feels betrayed. He feels cheated, confused, humiliated beyond words.

But what he does not feel, even as he waits for it to hit, is angry.

“I didn’t know,” Tripitaka says. “I thought it might, but I didn’t know for sure.”

It’s a confession, Monkey realises, struck by the reverent softness of her voice. She went into this knowing what might happen, knowing that she was surrendering far more than just her skin or her heart, that she was willing to open up and surrender her deepest secret, her truest self. That she cared for him, that she trusted him enough to know it, to see it, to—

No. To know and see _her_.

It is more than just being touched. At least, it’s more than being touched physically. Like he— like _she_ said: it is revealing every part of herself, revealing her most private parts and laying them out in front of him and hoping against all the odds that he will treat them with kindness, that he will handle them gently.

He can still feel the contact under his skin. The shimmering sensation, like ice-cold water and scalding metal all at once, pain but not violation, a new sense of awareness opening up some hidden third eye in his mind. He feels like his insides have been rearranged, like he has become something new simply for having touched Tripitaka and allowed her to touch him, for the trust he poured out of himself and the trust he received in return.

He lets all of this settle in his mind, his heart, his soul.

“You’re a girl.”

Almost imperceptibly, Tripitaka relaxes. “I’m a girl.”

“Not a boy.”

“Not a boy.”

Monkey swallows down this truth, tries the next. “Not a monk?”

“I…” The hesitation is palpable. “No. Not a monk, either.”

“Okay.” He takes a shaking breath, lets the word echo. “Okay.”

“Is it?”

Her vulnerability is like a physical thing. Like her touches, it finds a home under Monkey’s skin, a presence he never wants to let go. It settles inside of him like a secret, like a promise, and he wraps it around his ribs, close to that too-empty place where the Master’s memory still lives, and holds it tight.

“Yeah,” he says, to her and to himself. “Yeah, it is.”

And for now, at least it is true.

Nothing has changed, at least not really. Boy or not, monk or not, touching Tripitaka only reaffirmed what Monkey has known for some time, the terrifying but beautiful truth: that he cares for her, no matter her name or her body, that he trusts her, that he would place his life quite literally in her hands. Their lives are still intertwined, just as they were before, and their mission remains the same, their shared place in a world that so desperately needs them both.

In touching her hand, Monkey has seen the inside of Tripitaka’s soul; in a world where so few humans have a soul at all, he has seen that she does. And he knows now, even more surely than he did before, that it is good.

So, yeah. It’s okay.

Tripitaka is still looking at him, though, with that dizzy mixture of fear and anticipation. Like she needs more than just the words, like she needs him to prove it somehow, to make her believe it, know it, feel it.

“Monkey,” she says, halting and visibly frightened. “I’m not…”

And though she can’t bring herself to finish, still Monkey understands, instinctively, what she’s trying to say, and how he needs to respond.

He leans in, driven by instinct and intuition, driven by a centuries-old instinct to offer comfort and connection where he can. The Master made him a better person, a better dæmon; he filled him with empathy and honesty and warmth, right up to the moment of his death. And Monkey uses all of that now, drawing it out of himself and letting it fill this lifeless world with colour and light.

“You are,” he whispers. “Monk or not, boy or girl. You are Tripitaka.”

And he takes her hands in his, and he draws her fingertips to his chest, lets them catch the stuttering rhythm of his heartbeat, a soul with no body touched for the first time in five hundred years by a body, a _human_ , longing for a soul.

And he breathes and feels, and he is touched, he is connected, he is whole, and he understands so much more than he did before. 

And he is not afraid.

**


End file.
